Graphical user interfaces provide mechanisms for a software application and related processes operating on a computer system to graphically present information to a user of the computer system. There are numerous conventional techniques that a software application can utilize to generate or construct information to be presented within a graphical user interface. As an example, a software program may be configured with software code that produces data, graphics or other information encoded in one or more pages of a markup language such as the hypertext markup language (HTML). A software program such as a browser may display the HTML pages for presentation of the data, graphics or other information to user on computer display or monitor. As another example, a software application may encode information in extensible markup language (XML) in order to allow this information to be transferred to other software applications for various processing purposes. A software application equipped to utilize XML processing technologies can apply an extensible style sheet language (XSL) style sheet or an XSL transformation (XSLT) to process or convert a raw XML data source formatted in one manner into an output format that can be displayed on a graphical user interface. As a specific example, XSLT can perform an XML to HTML transformation so that XML encoded data can be displayed within an HTML compatible interface.
Typically, conversion of an XML data source using an XSL style sheet into a format that can be rendered in a graphical user interface requires that an application developer build Java classes. As an example, if an XML data source contains financial information and a user desires to see different types of reports concerning various relationships expressed in the data within the financial information, a software developer can use XSL and an XSLT tool to extract the desired data and then creates a Java class for each different type of report that the user desires to view. The Java classes are responsible for formatting the particular extracted XML information from the XML data source for presentation in a report such as a particular table style or graph within the graphical user interface.